The only interesting thing I did today was pick up my parents from the airport, which I’m starting to think was a mistake. From the minute they got off the plane all they would talk about was baseball. Even my brother, Capt. Baseball, actually told them to, and I quote: “stop talking about f*ing baseball.” Adding to this is serious jet lag and a 3 hour time difference between the east and west coasts. This results in EVERYONE being in a seriously shitty mood. Especially when something doesn’t go their way. For instance, this evening my father tried to check his email. Adelphia, being the worst cable company in the world (yes, far worst than Comcast) has, at the moment, some very broken email servers. They’ve been trying to fix them for quite some time. Lucky for me it’s only incoming mail. Since I don’t use Adelphia for anything but outgoing I’m ok. Unfortunatly for my father, he relies on his email. Instead of A) trying to fix the problem, B) calling Adelphia to see what the problem might be or C) trying again later he chooses option D. Option D includes throwing a temper-tantrum like an 8 year old girl and throwing, yes throwing, various items from his desk across the room. Then, in a loud pissed off voice, declairing that the cable modem was going back tomorrow and that he “didn’t want to deal with this shit.”

You can see that we’re dealing with things in a mature and adult manner at this point. I almost told him to go sit in the corner for 10 minutes of quite time. As for my actual reaction I said something along the line of “just settle down and try it in the morning.” Apparently this wasn’t a good idea and I was met with a “and its all your damn fault, my computer worked fine before.” At this point, I would like to point out that his “computer” is a whopping 133mhz and is running Windows 95. So “working fine” is a term that shouldn’t even enter into the description of this giant paper weight. I don’t see how its my fault that his computer can’t physically handle a cable modem. Sure, the point to all this is that his email should have been working. Yes, it should have. Did I break it? No. You want to get pissed at someone, call Adelphia. Acting like a spoiled fucking child won’t help either. I know you’ve “had a long day” but fuck you.

So, if his royal highness gets his way, which he will, I’ll be offline for the rest of the summer. I don’t exactly relish that idea so I’ll simply have to steal his modem. Or he can buy me another one, since he happens to be using my old one at the moment. And if he doesn’t like me using “his” modem, too fucking bad, he shouldn’t have returned a modem that was working fine just because he doesn’t know how to use it.

I’ve even offered to fix the problem or at the very least call Adelphia. That apparently wasn’t good enough. No, we’d rather complain about things that we could easily fix. It’s much easier to live with something when you’ve gone out of your way to prove that you’re incorrectly right. He’ll probably simmer down after a nights sleep… but he’ll probably return the modem anyway. I should also mention that while this story paints my father in a bad light, he actually gets pissed off quite rarely and is usually a mild mannered baseball coach type of person. That’s what happens when you spend all day travelling I suppose. Well, if I don’t post for a while, don’t be surprised. Later.